


Oh, Rats!

by CaptainSteeb



Series: Steve and Bucky Try To Function [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 1920's Steve and Bucky, Adult Steve and Bucky at the very end, Attempted dissection of a dead rat, Bad Decisions, Gen, Happy Ending, Humor, Kid Bucky Barnes, Kid Steve Rogers, M/M, Mention of ableism, Spanking as corporal punishment, Vomiting, kids being kids, mention of bullying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-30
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:07:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24448570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainSteeb/pseuds/CaptainSteeb
Summary: “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Steven Grant, what the devil are you doing?!”It's the 20's, Steve and Bucky are kids, and they find a dead rat in the yard behind Steve's tenement. Being bored eight year old boys, they take it upstairs and attempt to examine it.Then Sarah Rogers comes home. All in all, it's a disaster.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Steve and Bucky Try To Function [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1765621
Comments: 15
Kudos: 231





	Oh, Rats!

It was summer 1925 in Brooklyn and the weather was miserable.

Steve and Bucky had just finished their newsie shifts for the day, Steve almost getting beat up by the boss when he went off spouting “socialist shit” about how they didn’t get paid enough. Bucky had had to drag Steve, spitting and screaming and red-faced, away from their corner and down to the Rogers’ tenement before he’d finally calmed down.

“It ain’t fair!” Steve’s little blond head poked up out of a pile of trash behind a local speakeasy, his arms full of glass bottles. His face was still red and the gap where his top canine had fallen out the week before showed when he bared his teeth in anger. He shoved his armful at Bucky before diving back in.

“You can’t pick fights with Mister Grisham, Stevie.”

“Sure I can! You heard what he called my ma!” Steve’s squeaky voice was muffled in the pile of trash.

Bucky had heard what Mister Grisham had called Steve’s ma, but it was no worse than what Steve, the son of a poor Irish immigrant, got called by the other boys around the neighborhood. He just sighed and readjusted his grip on the bottles. He’d wanted to play stickball this afternoon, but the other boys wouldn’t let “Cripple Stevie” play, so it was just the two of them.

“He shouldn’t make us pay for papes we don’t sell! They need to give us better headlines!” Steve stumbled out of the pile with four more bottles in his arms, hair mussed, panting and sweaty. “How are we ‘apposed to sell “Woman Falls Into East River,” Buck?”

Bucky didn’t reply, too hot to match Steve’s energy and not particularly caring about the three cents they’d been cut short. His family, though not well-off by any means, could get by just fine and Pa let him keep his money.

Steve gave all this earnings to his Ma.

“Let’s go,” Bucky said, snatching one more bottle out of Steve’s arms before leading them up the alley, under the hole in the fence, and into the dirty yard behind Steve’s tenement. The “yard” was a small lot, unpaved and dusty. There were a few clotheslines strung across the back of it, and in the corner was a pile of trash from wealthier neighborhoods that Steve and Bucky dug through once a week. They walked over to a wooden plank, set their bottles in a straight line, and stepped back to the pile of rocks they had set up about ten feet away.

“I wish we could be at Coney Island,” Steve grumped, picking up the first rock and flinging it at a bottle. He missed, hissing something in Irish that Bucky didn’t understand but he knew was a naughty word.

“We ought to take the train out there.” The boys had become experts at sneaking onto the train. “We can share a hotdog.” Bucky flung a rock at a large green bottle and knocked it over.

“I ain’t had meat in months,” Steve said. “Probably it would make me puke.”

“Everything makes you puke, shrimp.”

Steve laughed and threw another rock, a perfectly round one, but it ricocheted off of a nearby crate and went flying into a far corner. “Nuts!” In all the time they’d done this, he’d only ever knocked over seven bottles. His vision wasn’t too great.

“Aw, Stevie, that was the best rock,” Bucky whined, jogging off to go retrieve it. “Why you always gotta use that one, you never hit nothing with it!” He poked around in the dirt for a bit, searching for the rock and being careful not to get poked with one of the stray nails that littered the lot, when he saw something long and flesh-colored out of the corner of his eye. Intrigued, he crouched down and pulled at it, revealing a limp, dead rat that had been hidden behind an old floorboard.

“Oh, wow!”

“What is it?” Steve came running over and kneeled down next to Bucky. “Oh, gee, Buck.”

“It’s dead,” Bucky said, eyes wide. He grabbed a nearby sliver of metal and poked at the rat, turning it over to reveal its stiffening legs.

“You ain’t never seen a dead rat before. You’re such a boob.”

Bucky shoved Steve’s shoulder. “Course I have, smartass! Only we ain’t got anything to do right now, right?”

“So what?”

“So let’s take it upstairs and look at it.”

Steve wrinkled his nose. “Look at it how? We’re looking at it just fine right here.”

“Nah, I mean we can cut it open and look at it!” A few months before, Bucky had been loitering at the library to get out of the heat and he’s stumbled upon a horse anatomy book. The subject had intrigued him but he never thought he’d get the chance to be real scientist, especially because Mister Harris always told him he wouldn’t ever learn anything if he didn’t learn how to sit still and be quiet.

Steve, lips pursed, glared at the rat for a few long moments, and looked over at Bucky with determined eyes. “Yeah, okay. Let’s do it. My ma’s working late today, anyway.”

“Your ma always works late,” Bucky said. He went over to the trash pile and grabbed a plank of wood, then walked back over and used the scrap of metal to shimmy the rat onto it.

The boys were giggling by the time they made it up to Steve’s place. The apartment was just one long narrow room, with a twin bed on one end and a makeshift kitchen on the other. Bucky plopped the rat on the kitchen table while Steve dug around in the drawers and pulled out a long knife with a wooden handle.

“Ma uses this one to cut the potatoes, so I figure it can cut through a rat,” Steve said, handing the knife to Bucky with a smile.

“That’s swell!” The two boys situated themselves in the rickety old chairs and leaned over to stare at the rat. Bucky’s hand shook a little as he hovered the knife over the rat’s belly.

“Oh,” Steve giggled, pointing at it, “it’s a boy.”

“Nasty.” Bucky grabbed the rat with one hand and, after a moment of hesitation, dragged the knife down its stomach.

Neither boy was prepared for the smell.

“ _Oy gevalt_!” Bucky dropped the knife and stumbled back, covering his nose with one forearm. “Oh, no, Stevie! Oh no, we gotta get it out of here!”

“It’s,” Steve started to say, going very pale and stumbling over to the ratty old sofa crammed up against the wall, “it’s…” A moment later, Steve was hunched over, throwing up the donut he’d begged off of old Mrs. O’Reilly earlier.

“ _Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Steven Grant, what the devil are you doing?!”_

Bucky’s eyes widened and he slowly looked over toward the door. This was the worst day of his life, he decided, upon seeing Mrs. Rogers standing in the doorway, her face red, hands on her hips.

“Oh no,” Bucky whispered, and promptly began crying.

It took a while for the boys to repent for their decision. They’d been made to throw the rat away properly, then clean the table and the knife until their hands were wrinkled while Mrs. Rogers contacted Bucky’s Ma to tell her what he’d done. When she came back, she pulled out a wooden spoon and gave both him and Steve a walloping.

“Your mother, bless her, told me to give you the spanking of your lifetime, James Barnes,” Mrs. Rogers said once she was done. Bucky, rubbing at his behind, scuffed his shoe against the floor and mumbled an apology.

“And you, Steven Grant, we’re going down to Father O’Connelly _this instant_ and you’re going to confess to him.”

“Yes, Mama.”

Mrs. Rogers sighed heavily, embraced both of the boys, and shooed Bucky home.

###

“It was your fault.”

“Bullshit! You’re the one who wanted to cut it up like a serial killer!”

Bucky grumped over at Steve, who was lazing at the opposite end of their sofa and sketching a cartoon of Tony getting attacked by the aliens they’d fought last week. He had a thought.

“Do you think Banner would let me have a go at one of those aliens we killed last week? He collected samples for dissection, right?”

Steve let his head fall back and groaned.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and Kudos make me smile! :) It's great to know if you guys enjoyed this.


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